As a business owner, you prefer to do a lot of email support outsourcing. With a managed outsourcing provider sending out your email customer service, newsletters, and promos (just to name a few) to your target customers, you can focus on your core business. You can also relax knowing that your communication will be received by your public in a safe private platform. But recent trends are making you rethink this strategy, especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence or AI. As you look at spreadsheets, budgets, and tech reports, you ask your managers and trusted lieutenants, “Email support outsourcing:  do you still need it in the time of the chatbots?”

Chatbots are fast becoming the new customer service representatives on the internet. Almost every business website that you’ve seen, including your competitors, have put in little boxes where this avatar pops up and starts responding to the customer query in a live chat. Their implementation has saved enterprises a lot of time and money when it comes to overhead, business efficiency, and overhead costs. You can’t help but think:  will email support outsourcing go the way of the home-based chat support?

Email support and empathy

While live chat and AI-led chat have come to their own online detente, collaborating instead of competing, the jury is still out when it comes to smart automation taking over email support outsourcing. The programming and technology may soon become available, but deployment is not immediate, not yet anyway. Email support services have been automated when it comes to their punctual and regular release — that much is true and evident. But a machine answering email queries as live chatbots do live chat inquiries still something that has to be studied and measured?

One thing to understand is that email support outsourcing goes beyond customer service email. It means that a human being who can feel and empathize with the customer’s queries can combine the right words and infuse the right tone into an email that will connect with a customer. This is not just a matter of rattling off internet-researched content, putting it into an email, and then sending it off to a customer. The answers do not just have to be thorough and accurate, they have to ‘sound’ human.

Establishing trust in email support outsourcing

What makes email support outsourcing is that it engenders trust between the company and the customer. It builds on the relationship already established by making the customer feel that the company does care for him and will attend to his concerns. That’s why email support outsourcing is done by individual email writers who take time to understand the complaint, peer through the emotional layers behind it, and then craft the reply with the appropriate tone and emotional shade.

Let’s go back to a time long ago before the coming of the internet. There were no emails, no newsletters, no online communication of any kind. If a customer complained by what we used to call snail or postal mail, then the company sends a postal mail back. The answers would tend to be generic: apology to the customer for the inefficiency, and an assurance that the company will take care of the problem. It was a custom-made one-answer-fits-all reply. All that the customer got was that the company would look into his concern. But knowing that a universal template was used could make him skeptical of the actual motivation of the company.

That kind of impersonal, cold kind of email will not work in a digital age where social media has made communication very personal. The remote staff that does your email support outsourcing are still very much needed. They can work with the chatbots should the time come, but their ability to empathize with your customers through online communication cannot be replaced. HOPLA is a distributed outsourcing company that rides the crest of digital change and have a database of skilled writers who can do effective email support outsourcing for you. Call us now.